work search and career development blog

Who are you REALLY?

Every career journey begins with a single step…whether it’s a step in the “right” or “wrong” direction is entirely up to you, the best way to know for sure is to hold up a mirror and truly recognize the person staring back. That means accepting both your strengths and challenges, they do after all define you! Honestly ask yourself the following:

Who am I?

What do I want out of my career?

What situations / experiences energize me?

What situations / experiences deplete me?

What am I truly interested in?

Where do my values come into play?

How important are my values in what I do?

You won’t necessarily come up with answers right away; after all, if we could we’d miss the excitement of discovery! To get the juices flowing think about taking some assessments to start things off.

Here’re a few you might want to check out:

At Mohawk College you can access StrengthsQuest, a free strengths based assessment that generates a list of your top 5 strengths along with a description of what they mean.

If you want to do the full John Holland’s Self-Directed Search (SDS) assessment, you can complete it for 10 dollars by clicking on the link below. It gives you a 3 letter code that best represents your work personality type, along with a list of occupations with descriptions that correspond to your code.

Personality Dimensions, is a test that identifies aspects of your personality such as core values, needs, talents and behaviors and how these things affect your interaction with others and therefore which work situations/environments best “fit” your personality. There’s also a Canadian version of this test called “True Colours.”